So You Wanna Be a Blogger Part 2

After a very long, tiring and ultimately drab Part 1, I think I can streamline things for you in Part 2.

But let’s refresh our memory.

1. Think of a site name. Register it with a registrar site, not the hosting site which offers free domain registration – you will be stuck with them for a long time unless you go to the hassle of transferring. I use godaddy.com for all of my site registrations.

2. They will send you a confirmation. Then you must get hosting. Find a decent host that you like – pay around $20 per month, not less, not more. You can pay less if you want, but don’t pay more until you need to later on.

3. Once you get the hosting, they will send you instructions. In those instructions will be their DNS pointers. You need to know these in order to point your site name to your server. They will look something like:

ns1.nameofsite.com and ns2.nameofsite.com

Log in to your Godaddy site (or whatever your registration site) and find domain manager – or DNS manager. There you will be given a way to change those numbers. And put in whatever your hosting says to put in. But usually they start with NS1 or NS2.

3. Your hosting site will give you a temporary address to start uploading files. This would be an IP address or a temporary site name. You can wait until your domain name has forwarded to start uploading files, or you can upload them to your temporary site and change them later.

—-The thing to remember about web stuff and blogging is that SHIT HAPPENS. You have to be flexible and patient. An old boyfriend of mine used to use the term “poke at it” until you get the right result. If something isn’t working, poke at it until it does. And that seems to work. You can’t really break it so usually the shit that’s happening is some kind of code error or connection error or permissions error. SHIT HAPPENS. Don’t lose patience. Just know that it’s part of the deal.

4. Okay, so you’ve got your site name and it’s been pointed to your hosting company and when you type your site name into your browser it goes to a temporary page. It’s all good. Things that can potentially go wrong would be — you didn’t enter the right DNS numbers, or you were a number off. But usually, it goes fairly smoothly.

Your next step is to download WordPress. I am not even going to bother telling you to use Movable Type. I gave it up long ago. I think it is a wonderfully developed program, but I think it is too top-heavy and WordPress has a better development community, that is, people who are investing a lot of time to design plugins and themes (we’ll get to that later) for WordPress.

Go to WordPress.org and download the latest version (you will have to repeat this process every time WordPress has an update, which is often).

5. The whole SQL debacle. Basically, many programs that are the future, or certainly the right now, run off an SQL database. I am just now starting to understand the SQL language. But that’s not what you need to know. You just need to know where your database is and what the login and password are. Sometimes your website control panel (given to you by your hosting company) will have set this up for you. Other times you need to create a database, a user and password. Either way, you need to know these for installing WordPress.

Sometimes, you can just upload all of your wordpress files and point your browser to:

http://www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin/ and you will be prompted to create a configuration file. There you will enter the database name, login and password. That’s if the permissions are set correctly. Otherwise, you’ll have to enter the information manually.

And it isn’t that hard, really, just poke at it until you get it right. You can’t break it.

Here it is summed up:
1. Download WordPress software.
2. login via FTP to your new hosting site.
3. Upload all of the wordpress files into your main site — it will be called either public html or web or sometimes just http. Most of the time, when you login in via ftp you will be where you need to be. Don’t upload the wordpress folder. Upload the contents from the wordpress folder into your site. This enables the index.php in wordpress to be your main page.
4. Configure wordpress either manually or through the web interface (database name, login, password).
5. You should be good to go. You will have a wordpress site with a login and a password!

Here are a few videos on installing WP.

Sometimes a mistake can be down to a capital letter instead of a lower case one.